established in our heart by
a better road than that which taste would take, the sensuous world would
remain the limit of our aspirations. We should not know, either in our
ideas or in our feelings, how to pass beyond the world of sense, and all
that imagination failed to represent would be without reality to us. But
happily it enters into the plan of nature, that taste, although it first
comes into bloom, is the last to ripen of all the faculties of the mind.
During this interval, man has time to store up in his mind a provision of
ideas, a treasure of principles in his heart, and then to develop
especially, in drawing from reason, his feeling for the great and the
sublime.

As long as man was only the slave of physical necessity, while he had
found no issue to escape from the narrow circle of his appetites, and
while he as yet felt none of that superior liberty which connects him
with the angels, nature, so far as she is incomprehensible, could not
fail to impress him with the insufficiency of his imagination, and again,
as far as she is a destructive force, to recall his physical
powerlessness. He is forced then to pass timidly towards one, and to
turn away with affright from the other. But scarcely has free
contemplation assured him against the blind oppression of the forces of
nature--scarcely has he recognized amidst the tide of phenomena something
permanent in his own being--than at once the coarse agglomeration of
nature that surrounds him begins to speak in another language to his
heart, and the relative grandeur which is without becomes for him a
mirror in which he contemplates the absolute greatness which is within
himself. He approaches without fear, and with a thrill of pleasure,
those pictures which terrified his imagination, and intentionally makes
an appeal to the whole strength of that faculty by which we represent the
infinite perceived by the senses, in order if she fails in this attempt,
to feel all the more vividly how much these ideas are superior to all
that the highest sensuous faculty can give. The sight of a distant
infinity--of heights beyond vision, this vast ocean which is at his feet,
that other ocean still more vast which stretches above his head,
transport and ravish his mind beyond the narrow circle of the real,
beyond this narrow and oppressive prison of physical life. The simple
majesty of nature offers him a less circumscribed measure for estimating
its grandeur, and, surrounded by the